Useful Reports/Publications

Source: Center for American Progress. In 2011, the Center for American Progress published “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” in order to identify and expose the organizations, scholars, pundits, and activists comprising a tightly linked network that spread misinformation and hateful propaganda about American Muslims and Islam. TheIn the three years since “Fear, Inc.” shined a light on the Islamophobia network and exposed the network’s key members, a number of them have been marginalized by the mainstream media and politicians.The first “Fear, Inc.” report sought to expose elements of the Islamophobia network by giving the mainstream public the information it needed to refute the claims and distortions made by the network’s misinformation experts. This report identifies the Islamophobia network’s ongoing efforts to promote policies that violate and contradict core American values and interests. The defense of these core values remains ongoing. As this report demonstrates, it only takes one individual with disproportionate influence to negatively affect the treatment of an entire group of American citizens.

Source: Equal Justice Initiative. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) today released Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, which documents EJI’s multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.

“…the war on terror has been largely a charade designed to make the American public believe that a terrorist army is loose in the U.S., when the truth is that most of the people convicted of terrorism-related crimes posed no danger to the U.S. and were entrapped by a preventive strategy known as preemptive prosecution.”
­­––from the introduction to Inventing Terrorists

Source: National Lawyers’ Guild. The NLG’s latest Know Your Rights guide is titled You Have the Right to Remain Silent. This 16-page booklet is designed for activists and others contacted by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, or local law enforcement. It also contains useful information for non-citizens and minors

Source: American University Law Review. In the past ten years, there has been little scrutiny of the hundreds of terrorism cases tried in the Article III courts and the state of the rights of people accused of terrrorism-related offenses in the federal system. The deference to assertions of national security that degraded protections for detainees at Guantanamo has similarly degraded the protections for Muslims facing terrorism charges in the federal courts. This Essay provides a close examination of one of those cases—that of Syed Fahad Hashmi—and reveals rights abridgement throughout the legal process (intrusive surveillance, vague material support charges, the use of prolonged pre-trial solitary confinement, classified evidence, the use of political activities to demonstrate mindset and intent).

Source: Congressional Research Service. In United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012), all nine Supreme Court Justices agreed that Jones was searched when the police attached a Global Positioning System (GPS) device to the undercarriage of his car and tracked his movements for four weeks. The Court, however, splintered on what constituted the search: the attachment of the device or the long-term monitoring. The majority held that the attachment of the GPS device and an attempt to obtain
information was the violation; Justice Alito, concurring, argued that the monitoring was a
violation of Jones’s reasonable expectation of privacy; and Justice Sotomayor, also concurring, agreed with them both, but would provide further Fourth Amendment protections. This report will examine these three decisions in an effort to find their place in the body of existing Fourth Amendment law pertaining to privacy, property, and technology.

Source: South Asian American Leading Together (SAALT). In Our Own Words: Narratives of South Asian New Yorkers Affected by Racial and Religious Profiling. The Collaborative’s objectives were to understand and illuminate the impact of ongoing profiling by attempting to answer three primary questions.